Letter: Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism

Published
12:20 pm EST, Thursday, January 9, 2020

When Jared Kushner said, “anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism,” he was completely accurate.

Anyone who read President Trump’s executive order knows it clearly states that it does not “diminish or infringe upon the rights protected under any other provision of law,” that is, the right to free speech. It does, however, provide a means to address anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Zionism that is destroying free speech on college campuses, where Jewish students and other supporters of Israel have been shouted down, defamed, vilified and physically menaced.

Zionism is the Jewish national movement of self-determination in the land of Israel, where Jews have lived for millennia, even while under occupation by Romans, Muslim Arabs and later Turks. Love of Zion, the biblical term for both the land of Israel and Jerusalem, is embedded in Jewish prayer, ritual, literature and culture.

A Human Rights Watch report found a systematic practice by both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas of arbitrary arrest and torture, and there have been no serious efforts to hold wrongdoers to account or any apparent change in policy or practice of Palestinians against their own people who dare to dissent.

Albert Einstein was a Zionist. Another Nobel laureate in physics, Steven Weinberg, has twice refused an invitation from a UK university because of boycotts against Israel. According to professor Weinberg, “... given the history of the attacks on Israel and the oppressiveness and aggressiveness of other countries in the Middle East and elsewhere, boycotting Israel indicated a moral blindness for which it is hard to find any explanation other than anti-Semitism.”